Verdun

you make ghosts
to fight the great war

boiling boots & belts
buttons breaking holes 
in bodies

thumb tacs in the wall

the floor of your son's room
with all his uniforms ready

will you fight for Prussia
for Germany?

whose honor medals are
blooming on your coats

rusted gold daffodils

snap the necks of rotary phones

there are so many men
who reenact that the ghosts
of dead soldiers are aroused

waking up in Newville
Pennsylvania

this isn't France

you tell me about
the battle of Verdun 

how when the bombs
went off there were people
instantly buried just
sitting side by side
in the trenches

rifle barrels gasping out
of the fleshly fucked 
earth 

even metal needs air

have you ever 
breathed through 
the barrel of a gun?

dad, i'm thinking of us 
in the car ride across 
long island 

passing a cemetery 
with cramped 
headstones:
my crooked four-year-old 
teeth with the names of
dead men written on 
them in sharpie

you say

before your time
they'll dig them all up
& build a strip mall there

i see bodies begging
to not be woken up

packed together like
my brother & i 
in bunk beds

one hour more
one hour more

i tell you that when i die
i hope someone burns me
so that i can take up
less space

become a handful

the texture of my
body finally made malleable
& silty after
all these years

leave foot prints 
in the loose backyard soil
after it rains tonight

you say you can feel
the raining coming 

the grey sky making
moth wings of us both

we should travel to
Verdun 

stand above the trenches

skeletons still pacing
beneath us

radios crooning shrapnel 

their Gatling guns 
resting on chapped lips

opening mouth to the field

choking on Germans  

dad, i want to pull them up
by their bayonets

like other root vegetables

orange carrots & 
blue-toed potatoes

if we have to be in the war
can we at least be the angels?

the ones when the smoke clears

shutting eyelids

let's stop here on the side
of the highway

dig a trench 

& watch the ghosts migrate
across the ocean

cross highways &
toll bridges

should we re-bury them?

should we bury ourselves 
while we're at it?

you helped me pull out
each of my baby teeth 

tombstones 
one by one

drop names in the hudson